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By Donald G. McNeil Jr.The New York Times • Sunday November 3, 2013 9:18 AM

STANFORD, Calif. — It is minutes to midnight. A sultry full moon hangs over Stanford, bathing
the campus’ red roofs and adobe-toned walls.

In the quad, thousands of students mill around, some bobbing drunkenly, some giggling, most
wearing clothes.

Finally, a male senior saunters over to a group of the youngest-looking women and asks: “Hey!
You freshmen? Can I kiss you?”

As the Stanford band plays and a giant screen shows famous movie clutches, the bravest women
step forward and receive the traditional welcome to one of the nation’s most-prestigious
universities: a big, wet, upperclassman smack.

Days later, another tradition arrives. Flu and mononucleosis, the “kissing disease,” sweep the
dorms.

Full Moon on the Quad — held this year on Oct. 22 — is an event unique in U.S. education: an
orgy of interclass kissing reluctantly, but officially, sanctioned by the university.

It is a domestic example of mass-gathering medicine, a new field in public health. The
best-known example is Saudi Arabia’s multimillion-dollar efforts to keep the annual pilgrimage to
Mecca as epidemic-free as possible.

For Stanford, the struggle is officials can’t outlaw it, so how can they make it safer?

The first step, said Dr. Ira M. Friedman, director of the Vaden Student Health Center, is to
make consent paramount.

“We try to create an environment in which they don’t feel they must participate in the exchange
of oral secretions,” he said.

His center also offers shots against what it can fight: flu and meningococcal meningitis, a rare
but sometimes dangerous infection known as “freshman meningitis.”

The most crucial role is played by the “peer health educators” who live in each dorm. They meet
with freshmen before the event and ask any with cold symptoms to feel free to watch, but not to
kiss anyone. And they teach safe kissing.

“We tell them, ‘Don’t floss beforehand, don’t brush, don’t do anything that could create
micro-abrasions in your gums for germs to get in,’ ” said Michelle Lee Mederos, a former peer
educator who graduated in 2011.

The event’s origins are lost in the fog of history. Legend holds that it began in the late 1800s
with senior men presenting freshmen women with roses.

Starting in 2002, deans debated outlawing it, rejected that as futile, and decided to impose
order instead. Now the quad is barricaded. Campus police check student IDs. Paramedics stand by. It
has been canceled only in 2009, the “pandemic swine flu” year.

Francisca Gilmore, a freshman that year, said in an email that she and some classmates braved
the odds anyway.

“Unofficially, a bunch of overeager freshmen and intoxicated upperclassmen gathered on the quad
and upheld the tradition,” she wrote.

Gilmore did get the flu that year, she wrote, but returned anyway in 2010, 2011 and 2012. She
got strep throat twice.

“The repercussions were brutal, and I wish I had done better on the Econ 1A final I took later,”
she admitted. “But I think in the long run, getting to tell people I’ve kissed over 50-plus people
in a night is worth it.”